$9 for $20 Worth of Casual Italian at Rotelli

The Crossing at McKenna Creek

In a Nutshell

Fast, casual restaurant

Extensive Italian menu

Very family friendly

Great Gahanna location

The Fine Print

Promotional value expires Jan 6, 2011. Amount paid never expires.Limit 1 per person. May buy multiples as gifts. Dine-in only. 1 per table. Not valid with other offers. Tax and gratuity not included. No cash back.Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.

Rotelli

If you ever called nonna's cooking casual, you’d wind up with a wooden spoon cracked across your backside. Not the case at Rotelli in Gahanna, a proud to be formality-free Italian restaurant with a menu that would still make grandma proud. Pull up a chair at the family-friendliest table with today’s deal: for $9, you get $20 toward your bill at Rotelli. Your Groupon is only good for dine-in, forcing you to suffer through the restaurant’s inviting and friendly atmosphere.

The service is somewhere between leisurely sit down and blazingly fast, a perfect compliment to the restaurant’s middle-ground nature, though the menu definitely takes the high road. It’s full of the eats that little Italian schoolchildren dream about at the moderate prices papas and mammas sing about in the shower.

Begin your feast with deep-fried zucchini ($5.99) or crispy calamari ($8.99). Then you have some thinking to do. Decide if tonight is a pizza, sandwich, pasta, or seafood night, or if everyone should pretend to be 12 and order from the kids' menu. Pizzas come in 10 inches or 16 inches and span the gamut from traditional cheese ($12.99/16-inch) to unorthodox buffalo chicken ($15.99/16-inch). Or you can build your own, starting with a cheese base and adding $1.99 for each additional ingredient (on a 16-inch pie; $1.29 per ingredient on a 10-inch pie).

If you prefer your pizza folded, grab a calzone ($7.99). Or if you’d rather your food not be some sort of pizza variation, snag a sub such as the chicken parmigiana ($7.99) or a veggie wrap ($6.99). The pasta selection is quite extensive and features classics such as manicotti ($13.99) and meat lasagna ($13.99). Seafood fans will fawn over the pelagic depth of oceanic offerings, ranging from spaghetti with clam sauce to snapper filet ($15.99). On the kids' menu, prices for tikes range from $4 to $8 and are simple dishes, such as butter noodles that are less likely to be thrown back in your face by disgruntled mini eaters.